Innovation & Tech

What Happened to Sora? OpenAI Killed Its Own Product

What happened to Sora? OpenAI killed it. The Sora team posted on X: “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora

By Conor Healy

April 24, 2026

What Happened to Sora? OpenAI Killed Its Own Product

What happened to Sora? OpenAI killed it. The Sora team posted on X: “We’re saying goodbye to the Sora app. We know this news is disappointing.” The announcement came 103 days after launch. Even some Sora staffers did not see it coming. Neither did Disney.

According to Reuters, a Disney team was actively working with OpenAI on a Sora-related project on a Monday evening. Thirty minutes after that meeting ended, they got the call. Sora was being discontinued. A source familiar with the matter called it “a big rugpull.” Disney had signed a billion-dollar deal. They pulled out entirely.

Sam Altman once described Sora as a “Cambrian explosion of creativity.” Now it is gone. The app, the API, all of it scrubbed. The real story is not about video generation. It is about a company bleeding money with no clear path to profitability.

The Math That Killed Sora

According to Forbes, Sora cost OpenAI up to $15 million per day to run. At that rate, Disney’s entire billion-dollar investment would have burned through in about two months.

How much revenue did Sora generate in its lifetime? According to TechCrunch, $2.1 million. That is not a typo. A product that cost $15 million daily brought in $2.1 million total.

Bill Peebles, who led the Sora team, reportedly acknowledged the economics were “completely unsustainable.” Reports suggest Sora was consuming compute resources needed by other OpenAI teams. The product was not just unprofitable. It was cannibalising internal capacity.

A Moderation Nightmare

Giving everyone a free AI video generation tool turned out to be a problem. According to The Atlantic, one journalist opened Sora one morning and scrolled through fake Iran War scenes, AI-generated Trump clips, and what she described as her “least favorite,” a video of a man deep frying an infant.

Copyrighted cartoon characters appeared in situations that were not family-friendly. AI content from Sora spread to other social media platforms. The Atlantic described it spreading “like a virus,” polluting feeds with AI slop. The platform was actively incentivising users to generate as much content as possible. Moderation at that scale was close to impossible.

Sora was also a legal liability. Questions circulated from the start about what training data OpenAI had used. The model could generate copyright-infringing material at scale. Deep fakes were trivial to produce. For a company preparing an IPO, this was not a defensible position.

The Competition Caught Up

When Sora launched in 2024, it was genuinely impressive for its time. The demos sent tech companies in the US and China scrambling to build their own video generation models. By 2026, they had caught up.

Google’s VO platform now supports 4K output with spatial audio. Adobe’s Firefly is integrated directly into Premiere Pro and trained on clean, licensed imagery. Runway and Kling improved rapidly. And then there is Seed Dance 2.0, which many consider the current leader.

Whatever edge Sora had is gone. OpenAI was left with an expensive, legally complicated product that had fallen behind technically. Every dollar and GPU hour spent on Sora was a dollar and GPU hour not spent on products that might actually define their future.

OpenAI by the Numbers

What happened to Sora makes more sense when you look at OpenAI’s broader financials. The company is on track to lose $14 billion in 2026. Revenue has crossed $20 billion annually, but spending outpaces it by a wide margin. The Guardian reported that if current trends continue, OpenAI will burn through half a trillion dollars by the end of the decade.

In early April, OpenAI announced a $122 billion funding round. That sounds like confidence until you examine who invested. Amazon put in up to $50 billion. Nvidia contributed $30 billion. SoftBank added another $30 billion. These are not neutral parties. Amazon needs AI demand to justify AWS infrastructure. Nvidia needs compute demand to sell GPUs. SoftBank has bet its portfolio on the AI narrative.

This is circular financing. The companies funding OpenAI are the same companies that need OpenAI to succeed. Even Jensen Huang, while committing Nvidia’s $30 billion, reportedly raised concerns about OpenAI’s “lack of discipline” in its business approach.

The Secondary Market Tells a Different Story

Outside investors are less enthusiastic. Bloomberg reports that private OpenAI shares are being sold on the secondary market, and sometimes there are no buyers.

Next Round Capital founder Ken Smay told Bloomberg: “We literally couldn’t find anyone in our pool of 100 institutional investors to take these OpenAI shares. Buyers have indicated they have $2 billion of cash ready to deploy into Anthropic.”

Anthropic’s enterprise market share grew from 18% to 29% in 2025. Eight of the Fortune 10 are now Anthropic customers. OpenAI, which historically had the stronger brand, is playing catch-up. The brand gap widened when OpenAI accepted a Department of Defense deal that Anthropic had rejected on moral grounds.

The Podcast Purchase

After raising $122 billion, OpenAI’s first acquisition was a podcast. The company paid reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for TBPN, a daily tech and business show with 70,000 average daily viewers and 324,000 X subscribers.

When Axios asked Altman if the reported price in the “low hundreds of millions” was accurate, he declined to comment. TBPN had announced a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange in December 2025. OpenAI is planning an IPO later this year.

Altman explained the logic in the same interview: “Someone said to me recently that if AI were a political candidate, it would be the least popular political candidate in history. And given the amazing things AI can do, I think there’s got to be better marketing for AI.”

OpenAI bought a media company to market AI to the public ahead of an IPO. That is the strategy.

Figure Robotics Gave Them an F

OpenAI has stated it is pivoting toward robotics. The Sora team has reportedly been reassigned to World Model Research with a robotics focus. But OpenAI’s track record in that space is not encouraging.

Figure Robotics CEO Brett Adcock previously partnered with OpenAI. Sam Altman led Figure’s Series B and joined the board. The two companies spent a year working together on AI models for humanoid robots.

Adcock described the outcome on a podcast: “I ended up firing them. We just found that the team we had internally, we just ran circles around them every day. We had a hard time getting them in the office.”

He went further, suggesting OpenAI was on its way to copying proprietary technology: “We were showing them how we were doing all this work. And I got a call one day saying, ‘Hey, we’ve been watching your progress. It’s unbelievable. We’re thinking about doing robotics work internally.’ And I was just like, this is over. Get out of here. We’re teaching you how to do robot learning.”

The New Yorker Exposé

In early April, The New Yorker published an 18-month investigation into Sam Altman. The piece included private emails, internal notes, and interviews with insiders.

One board member reportedly called Altman “a sociopath.” Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator and Altman’s former mentor, allegedly told colleagues that Altman had been “lying to them the entire time.”

OpenAI’s own CFO reportedly had doubts about the company’s $600 billion spending commitments and did not believe OpenAI was ready for an IPO this year. According to reports, Altman removed her from financial meetings with investors. Investors noted her absence was “noticeable and awkward.”

IPO Prep Mode

What happened to Sora is not an isolated product failure. It is a signal of a company under pressure making hard cuts before a public offering.

Fijji Simo, OpenAI’s applications chief, told staff in a companywide meeting: “We cannot miss this moment because we’re distracted by side quests.” She said the company needed to “nail productivity” on the business front.

The Sora shutdown, the rebrand of the product organisation to “AGI Development,” the pivot to enterprise, Altman’s stated focus on “raising capital, supply chains, and building data centres at unprecedented scale.” It all points to IPO preparation.

OpenAI has 900 million weekly users. They have raised more money than some countries’ GDP. They are also one of the least trusted companies in tech, and the financial picture is getting harder to defend. Half a trillion in projected burn. A product that cost $15 million a day and made $2 million total. A billion-dollar partner blindsided with 30 minutes notice.

The question is no longer what happened to Sora. The question is what happens to OpenAI.